Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early 90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out of c

Most accounts I've heard say that Microsoft was the place to be in the early 90's, and many smart people wanted to work there, particularly ones coming out of college, and Microsoft software was crap because executive decisions and backward compatibility made it crap, not because their hackers were crap. People who read the Windows 2000 source leak said that it was fairly uniformly well-written code, whose comments indicated that its authors knew they were making everything ugly and klugey, but couldn't do much about it and preserve compatibility. So I somewhat doubt that good employee hackers can steer a fundamentally really evil main guy away from being evil.